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The Only Way to End Racialized Gender Violence in Prisons Is to End Prisons: a Response to Russell Robinson’S “Masculinity As Prison” Dean Spade

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The Only Way to End Racialized Gender Violence in Prisons Is to End Prisons: a Response to Russell Robinson’S “Masculinity As Prison” Dean Spade Berkeley Law Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository The irC cuit California Law Review 12-2012 The Only Way to End Racialized Gender Violence in Prisons is to End Prisons: A Response to Russell Robinson’s “Masculinity as Prison” Dean Spade Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/clrcircuit Recommended Citation Spade, Dean, "The Only aW y to End Racialized Gender Violence in Prisons is to End Prisons: A Response to Russell Robinson’s “Masculinity as Prison”" (2012). The Circuit. Paper 4. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/clrcircuit/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the California Law Review at Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in The irC cuit by an authorized administrator of Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. California Law Review Circuit Vol. 3 December 2012 Copyright © 2012 by California Law Review, Inc. The Only Way to End Racialized Gender Violence in Prisons is to End Prisons: A Response to Russell Robinson’s “Masculinity as Prison” Dean Spade* INTRODUCTION In Masculinity As Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration,1 Professor Russell Robinson explores the creation of the K6G unit of the Los Angeles County Jail. Robinson describes how this unit, designed to protect prisoners who may be targets because of their non-normative gender and/or sexual orientation, operates as a site for the enforcement of racialized and classed norms about sexual orientation and gender. In order to be housed in the K6G unit, prisoners must undergo screening2 performed by two white, heterosexual deputies. These deputies quiz the prisoners on their familiarity with gay subcultural terminology and details about the West Hollywood neighborhood, a gathering place for white gay men in Los Angeles, in order to determine their suitability for the unit.3 Once prisoners are admitted to the unit, they wear special powder blue uniforms to differentiate them from general- Copyright © 2010 California Law Review, Inc. California Law Review, Inc. (CLR) is a California nonprofit corporation. CLR and the authors are solely responsible for the content of their publications. * Dean Spade is an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law. He is the author of NORMAL LIFE: ADMINISTRATIVE VIOLENCE, CRITICAL TRANS POLITICS AND THE LIMITS OF LAW (2011). 1. Russell Robinson, Masculinity as Prison Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration, 99 CALIF. L. REV. 1309 (2011). 2. Id. at 1311. 3. Id. 184 2012] TO END RACIALIZED GENDER VIOLENCE IN PRISONS 185 population prisoners, who wear dark blue.4 Robinson’s article exposes how the racialized, gendered, and classed construction of homosexuality, and the figure of the vulnerable gay prisoner, are produced and enforced in the Los Angeles County Jail to the detriment of queer and trans people of color and poor people who bear the brunt of racist, homophobic, and transphobic policing and criminalization. Robinson argues that the problematic practices of the K6G unit should be contested as a violation of the privacy rights of prisoners.5 Robinson’s description of the K6G unit and its screening process offers an excellent site for engaging in a critique of projects that seek to protect those facing the most violent consequences of white supremacy, heterosexism, and gender binarism by achieving recognition or legibility for them in state apparatuses of security that are themselves key locations of that violence. This point is broadly useful given the centrality of recognition- and inclusion- focused legal equality strategies in contemporary white gay politics, which have both been a product of and worked to reify the limited and racist framings of gay identity that Robinson critiques in his article. The most well-resourced and well-publicized examples, extensively critiqued by many scholars and activists,6 are the efforts to seek inclusion in marriage and military service, which have dominated as the most legible political claims of gay and lesbian rights in recent decades. Scholars and activists have also critiqued hate crimes legislation as a project that seeks recognition for those targeted by violence by expanding the punishing power of the criminal punishment system.7 Critics 4. Id. at 1321. 5. Id. at 1378. 6. See, e.g., THAT’S REVOLTING! QUEER STRATEGIES FOR RESISTING ASSIMILATION (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore ed., 2004); LISA DUGGAN, THE TWILIGHT OF EQUALITY?; NEOLIBERALISM, CULTURAL POLITICS, AND THE ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY (2004); Ian Barnard, Fuck Community, or Why I Support Gay-Bashing, in STATES OF RAGE: EMOTIONAL ERUPTION, VIOLENCE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE 74–88 (Renée R. Curry & Terry L. Allison eds., 1996); Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee & Dean Spade, Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got, in CAPTIVE GENDERS: TRANS EMBODIMENT AND THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX 15– 41 (Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith eds., 2011); Cathy J. Cohen, Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?, 3 GLQ: J. LESBIAN & GAY STUDIES 437 (1997); Paula Ettelbrick, Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?, 6 OUT/LOOK: NAT’L LESBIAN & GAY Q. 14 (1989); Katherine M. Franke, The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage Politics, 15 COLUM. J. GENDER & L. 236 (2006); Angela P. Harris, From Stonewall to the Suburbs? Toward a Political Economy of Sexuality, 14 WM, & MARY BILL RTS. J. 1539 (2006); Darren Lenard Hutchinson, “Gay Rights” for “Gay Whites”? Race, Sexual Identity, and Equal Protection Discourse, 85 CORNELL L. REV. 1358 (2000); Chandan Reddy, Time for Rights? Loving, Gay Marriage, and the Limits of Legal Justice, 76 FORDHAM L. REV. 2849 (2008); Ruthann Robson, Assimilation, Marriage, and Lesbian Liberation, 75 TEMP. L. REV. 709 (2002); Craig Willse & Dean Spade, Freedom in a Regulatory State? Lawrence, Marriage and Biopolitics, 11 WIDENER L. REV. 309 (2005); Kenyon Farrow, Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black?, KENYON FARROW (June 14, 2005), http://kenyonfarrow.com/2005/06/14/ is-gay-marriage-anti-black/. 7. See Bassichis, Lee & Spade, supra note 6, at 17, 33–35; Sarah Lamble, Transforming Carceral Logics 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis, in CAPTIVE GENDERS: TRANS EMBODIMENT AND THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, supra note 6, at 235–65, 249–52; JOEY L. MOGUL ET AL., QUEER (IN)JUSTICE: THE CRIMINALIZATION OF LGBT PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES 118–39 (2011); Katherine Whitlock, In a Time of Broken 186 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW CIRCUIT [Vol. 03:184 argue that hate crimes laws not only fail to prevent violence against queer and trans people, they also build the arsenal of the criminal punishment system, which is the most significant perpetrator of violence against queer and trans people.8 This essay extends this critical engagement with recognition- and inclusion-focused reforms to look at the subject of Robinson’s study, the K6G unit. It asks what Robinson’s findings might suggest about how queer and trans politics addresses criminalization. Specifically, I argue that prison abolition scholarship provides the critical tools necessary to fully understand why reforms like the creation of a special unit in the Los Angeles County Jail for gay and trans prisoners will consistently fail to address violence and will, in fact, become new sites for enforcing racialized gender and sexuality norms to the detriment of the most criminalized populations. Robinson successfully exposes the absurdity of a project to properly identify vulnerable prisoners by quizzing them about and measuring them against white gay cultural norms. I suggest that privacy arguments do not do enough to help us analyze the problems with the K6G unit. We need the politics and analysis developed by prison abolition scholarship and activism in order to even begin to imagine any solutions that would reduce or eliminate the horrifying conditions facing trans, gender non-conforming, and queer prisoners. I. PUNISHMENT AND THE STATE ADMINISTRATION OF RACE AND GENDER Angela Davis has described the historical trajectory that formed the criminal punishment system as a response to the formal abolition of slavery.9 As she and others have pointed out, the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of involuntary servitude includes a very important caveat: “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”10 Davis describes how, in the years following the abolition of slavery, southern prisons drastically expanded and went from being almost entirely white to primarily imprisoning Black people.11 New laws were passed—the Black Codes—that criminalized an extensive range of behaviors and statuses, such as being unemployed or Bones: A Call to Dialogue on Hate Violence and the Limitations of Hate Crimes Legislation (Rachael Kamel ed., Justice Visions Working Paper, 2001), available at http://srlp.org/files/Broken%20 Bones-1.pdf. 8. See, e.g., Dean Spade, Methodologies of Trans Resistance, in A COMPANION TO LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER, AND QUEER STUDIES 237–61 (George Haggerty & Molly McGarry eds., 2007); DEAN SPADE, NORMAL LIFE: ADMINISTRATIVE VIOLENCE, CRITICAL TRANS POLITICS AND THE LIMITS OF LAW 101–70 (2011); Whitlock, supra note 7. 9. ANGELA Y. DAVIS, ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 23–39 (2003). 10. U.S. CONST. amend. XIII; see also COLIN DAYAN, THE LAW IS A WHITE DOG: HOW LEGAL RITUALS MAKE AND UNMAKE PERSONS 62–64 (2011) (describing instances where Black people convicted of crimes were sentenced to be publicly auctioned
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